Mott Transitions to make electronics better

Mott transition is a metal that occurs in metal chalcogenides and transition metal oxides. This is usually thermally driven material but can also be modified using electrical current, pressure and doping and by quantum confinement within atomic-scale thin layers. A team of researchers at MESA + institute of University of Twente in the Netherlands and the U.S Department of Energy Argonne National Laboratory made this latest discovery.

According to the research a more efficient form of electronics based on Mott transition devices will be prepared that will connect the classical and quantum mechanics together in an non-equilibrium physics.Although the researchers had set up the experiment to study pinned or mobile magnetic vortices that are part of the signature of superconductivity they recognized that system behaved like a Mott transition driven by electronic current rather than by temperature.

These systems will offer an alternative to silicon transistors thus increasing the productivity as they can be switched between conducting and insulating states with only a small change in voltage for encoding 1’s and 0’s. At the University of Twente, they have built a system that comprises of 90,000 superconducting niobium nanometer-scale islands on top of a gold film. At this point they find their minimum energy by settling into energy dimples like arrangement of an egg crate, and make it a Mott insulator.